Bangladesh Bank Website Down After Website Offline Amid Global Cybersecurity Alerts
Bangladesh Bank took its website offline around noon Thursday as a precaution following a global cybersecurity alert, the central bank’s spokesperson said.
Executive Director and spokesperson Arief Hossain Khan confirmed the shutdown to The Daily Star, saying the bank’s IT department was working on the issue. He did not provide a timeline for restoring the website.
The website displayed a maintenance notice, stating that services were temporarily unavailable.
The move comes amid heightened concern over newly disclosed vulnerabilities in PHP, a widely used programming language. Cybersecurity firms Calif and Wiz identified the flaws using artificial intelligence tools. Although patches were released, details of the vulnerabilities became public before all affected systems could be secured.
Authorities in the Netherlands, France, Denmark, and Finland took websites offline Wednesday as a precaution against potential exploitation. Telecommunications company Orange and Japanese firms, including Nomura and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, also suspended services.
Cloudflare reported a sharp increase in attempted attacks, from thousands to millions, while Censys data indicated that about 1.5 million of 2.6 million servers remained unpatched.
Bangladesh Bank has faced major cybersecurity incidents in the past. In 2016, hackers stole $101 million from its account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, prompting then-Governor Atiur Rahman to resign. In 2023, the central bank suspended some internal web-based services for 36 hours as a precaution against a potential cyberattack.
